Elena Aronova

I am a historian of science working on the history of environmental and evolutionary sciences in  the twentieth century. I study the ways in which scientific practices are affected by, and contribute to, social and political order. My project,  Doing Things with Data: the Cold War Political Economy of Environmental Archives, investigates the politics and contexts of environmental data collection, archiving, and exchange during the Cold War. Tracing the data histories of the International Geophysical Year (the IGY, 1957-8), I show how the practices of World Data Centers in geophysics in the 1950s and 1960s were shaped by, and shaped, the subtle Cold War political economies.  This work is part of the working group "Historicizing Big Data," and a contribution to a thematic volume of Osiris devoted to "Histories of Data" (2017), which I co-edit with David Sepkoski and Christine von Oertzen. In relation to this project I am also collaborating with the IT Department of the MPIWG on a digital humanities resource with the aim at producing a spatial history of the IGY. The project website provides an access to a geo-referential map linked to the database that allows to search and visualize the data collection network and data flow enabled by the IGY.

I am also working on the history of "science studies" as it resurfaced in early Cold War as a politically relevant area of expertise, on both sides of the "iron curtain." This project was my dissertation, which I am now revising into a book tentatively titled Science and the Cultural Cold War: Thinking Science on the Opposite Sides of the Iron Curtain. The issues related to the history of Science Studies in different national and political contexts are also discussed in the forthcoming collection of 11 papers, titled "Paradigms Defected: Politics and Contexts of Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond," which I co-edit with Simone Turchetti. 

I received my PhD in History and Science Studies at the University of California at San Diego in 2012, after earning a doctorate in Biology and History of Science from the Russian Academy of Science. In 2011/2012 I was a fellow-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Greifswald (Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg-Greifswald). Following my residency at the MPIWG I will join the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an Assistant Professor.